“Born for a Storm”: Hard-Right Social Media and Civil Unrest

Abstract

Does activity on hard-right social media lead to hard-right civil unrest? If so, why? We created a spatial panel dataset comprising hard-right social media use and incidents of unrest across the United States from January 2020 through January 2021. Using spatial regression analyses with core-based statistical area (CBSA) and month fixed effects, we find that greater CBSA-level hard-right social media activity in a given month is associated with an increase in subsequent unrest. The results of robustness checks, placebo tests, alternative analytical approaches, and sensitivity analyses support this finding. To examine why hard-right social media activity predicts unrest, we draw on an original dataset of users’ shared content and status in the online community. Analyses of these data suggest that hard-right social media shift users’ perceptions of norms, increasing the likelihood they will participate in contentious events they once considered taboo. Our study sheds new light on social media’s offline effects, as well as the consequences of increasingly common hard-right platforms.

How Symbols Influence Social Media Discourse: An Embedding Regression Analysis of Trump’s Return to Twitter

“…For example, our results indicate that symbols’ discursive consequences can be short-lived. In contrast, Karell et al (2023) found evidence that symbols of elite status (i.e., badges assigned to accounts by a social media platform) can influence users a month later. This difference may be due to the analysis of different kinds of symbols; unlike Trump’s reinstatement, the symbols of eliteness explicitly convey a notion of relative social status.…”

“…This difference may be due to the analysis of different kinds of symbols; unlike Trump’s reinstatement, the symbols of eliteness explicitly convey a notion of relative social status. Moreover, Karell et al (2023) argued that the symbols’ effect is due to how it interacts with the content’s lexical dimension. This suggests a related opportunity for future work: after distinguishing content’s lexical and symbolic properties, and perhaps variants of these properties, researchers can theorize and analyze their interactions.…”

“…For example, in their study on religious figures’ endorsement of tweets promoting intercommunal tolerance in Lebanon, Siegel and Badaan (2020) argued that although endorsements may be written, their influence depends on invoking, or symbolizing, their authors’ religious standing. Karell et al (2023) provide an example of a nonwritten symbol by highlighting how accounts’ markers of status—in this case, a gold badge conveying elite status on Parler—can influence other users’ interpretation of these accounts’ posts.…”

“…Building on three earlier discussed literatures—the work indicating that online content’s symbolic properties play some role in shaping users’ discourse (e.g., Anspach 2021; Karell et al 2023; Siegel and Badaan 2020), the research describing Trump’s significance as a politicized symbol (e.g., Brooks and Harmon 2022; Graham et al 2021), and the research emphasizing politicized symbols’ ability to cue social and political boundaries (e.g., Scoville et al 2022; Smirnova 2018)—we construct our first hypothesis.…”

Razonamiento ciudadano en redes y la economía de la atención. Desafíos actuales y futuros para la enseñanza de la Historia en Chile y América Latina

“…Sin embargo, la aceleración en el uso de medios digitales con fines informativos y políticos entre personas cada vez más jóvenes (Castells, 2012), junto a la relevancia que la política les ha otorgado a estos espacios para difundir sus ideas (Jennings & Zeitner, 2003;Effing, Hillegersberg & Huibers, 2011), especialmente en periodos de campaña, ha puesto en alerta durante los últimos años a diversos investigadores, que han observado cómo frente a relatos extremistas o polarizantes (Karell, et al, 2023;Bail, 2021), la forma en que concebimos el aprendizaje y el pensamiento crítico, deben entenderse de manera un poco diferentes.…”